Shape Workshop level designer for iPhone and Android

Update: 3/10/2012

Over the last few months I've been working on a 2D level builder for iPhone and Android. I'm excited to say that I'll be starting the public beta testing phase this week. The program provides a huge amount of functionality and makes designing 2D levels really easy.

If you're interesting in helping with the beta testing you can sign up at the bottom of the page. When the beta's released I'll notify you by email. The beta will be limited so if you're interested, sign up before it becomes full. Any beta tester who submits at least one bug report will get a pro license half price and anyone who submits 4 or more bug reports will get the license for free!

So what's so great about Shape Workshop?

There's nothing on the market which comes close to Shape Workshop in flexibility or power. Here are the core features:

SVG Import:

SVG import for a wide range of shapes and path types

With Shape Workshop has full SVG support. Design your levels in Illustrator or Inkscape and you can import the shapes straight into the level designer. Shape Workshop fully supports: Rectangles, Polygons, Circles, Freehand lines and Lines as well as Cubic and Quadratic Benzier curves. Because Shape Workshop offers native support of benzier curves you can adjust optimise the number of points in the curve from within the program. When you want to publish your level Shape Workshop will also automatically render and crop sprites from the SVG file and either export the images separately or pack them into an optimised sprite sheet.

Sprite Tracing:

Trace and triangulate polygons - see the results live

The sprite tracing engine allows you to import a sprite from a file and then trace points around the outline. By adjusting parameters you can achieve the optimum balance between tracing accuracy and number of points.

Triangulation of concave polygon:

Triangulate complex shapes instantly

Most physics engines only support convex polygons and usually have a limit on the number of points which the shape can have. Shape Workshop allows you to triangulate your shape with one click. Then, if you change the tracing accuracy or spline precision the triangulation will automatically be updated.

Level Design Canvas:

Design complex levels and then export the level to iPhone or Android with one click

Once you've imported your objects you can start setting up your scene. Move, rotate and duplicate your objects until the scene is how you want it. Some other level designers don't allow you to do this which means you have to spend hours manually setting the positions of objects afterwards. Shape Workshop also allows you to work on multiple levels from withing the same project. Switch between levels with the click of a button and then save all the levels along with their sprites in one go.

In program physics simulation:

Test your physics simulations in program

Shape Workshop has a Box2D physics simulator built in! Using the interface you can give each item it's own physics properties and then watch how the scene unfolds. Shape Workshop has a system of presets which saves you time entering properties for multiple objects. Save a series of properties as a preset, select a group of objects and apply the physics attributes to all of them in one go.

Flexible Profiles:

Create custom profiles for your game

I wanted to make Shape Workshop as flexible as possible so I decided to make properties flexible. Shape Workshop allows you to build your own profiles and then assign them to game elements. Lets say you are writing a racing game and you want to control the attributes of the computer controlled racers. In Shape Workshop you can create your own profile to do this. By providing a simple XML file Shape Workshop will create a fully interactive input form. You can then associate these custom properties with objects in the level. When you import the scene to your game you will have easy access to this information. This gives you a huge amount of flexibility and saves you having to create your own config files.

Easy Export:

With Shape Workshop I've made it really easy to export your level to iPhone or Android. Just choose a destination directory and click "Publish to iPhone" or "Publish to Android". Shape Workshop will create a config file containing the level's geometry and properties; then pack all the sprites onto one sprite sheet and export the whole lot to the specified location. Shape Workshop comes with powerful open source libraries to include in your Android or iPhone project. Using these libraries you can reproduce your level on the phone with around 4 lines of code.

Committed support:

I'm really excited by this project and It's going to continue developing. I already have a long list of features I want to add to version 1.1 including: built-in joints, layers, a profile manager and much more! I'm also going to be writing lots of tutorials to help you get started creating amazing games with Shape Workshop!

Public Beta:

I'm looking for testers to help with beta testing of Shape Workshop. Ideally I'm looking for experienced developers who can put Shape Workshop through it's paces. If you're interested visit the beta tester signup page below. As I said earlier, every tester who identifies and fully reports at least one bug will get a 50% discount on the price of the application when it's released. Any tester who identifies and reports four or more bugs will get the full license for free!

It seems Android export generates plist file that is an iphone file. I'm pretty sure it's a bug. XML export should be nice for Android platform or rather JSON export (don't know if it's possible for you). Android JSON Parser is excellent and easy to use (xml dom parser a little bit less). Keep up the good work :)

It's not a bug. Originally I was using XStream to produce an XML file however it was a real pain to get it working with Android. In the end, I found a light weight library to read .plist files so I decided to go with that. I know it's a bit counter intuitive if you're not an iOS developer. In the next version I'll work on getting more export options.